Dragonfriend (46 page)

She had a crazy idea of how they might escape. “Flicker! Go to the gate! Insult the Dragon!”

* * * *

Picking up his battered body, Flicker stared at straw-head. Whatever was she thinking? Meantime, the Green Dragon heaved past the metal cages, lifting his muzzle over the tunnel’s edge not five feet from Lia. She stood stock-still, frozen in that ready position which he hoped by his wings was the one that could spring into action in the flip of a dragonet’s wings, not the rooted-in-terror possibility which he had also seen a couple of times. Right. Insult the beast? Lia had picked the right dragonet for the job.

Over here, you crusty thousand-year-old swamp leech!
Flicker shrieked.
You decrepit son of a flatworm, you bilious glob of phlegm!

The Dragon’s head jerked.

Can’t catch me, you corpulent sot! Cud-munching quadruped! You’re a disgrace to your sire and your lineage, you wheezing, toothless lump of mouldy windroc excrement! You hang from that ledge like diseased snot dangling from a Human’s left nostril–

That was more than the Green Dragon could tolerate. His shoulders bulged as every muscle in his body tightened. The Green shot a Human-sized glob of acid spit at the dragonet. Flicker zipped out of the way. Direct hit! Two soldiers who had been creeping down the stairs behind him collapsed, screaming as their clothes and flesh hissed and boiled. The metal grating sagged as the powerful acid devoured the metal.

Oh, Lia was definitely his fire-eyes again! How cunning … Flicker performed a celebratory aerial somersault as Hualiama thrust at the Green Dragon’s eye, but her stroke only pierced his cheek. The Green Dragon’s paw blurred as he struck! Flicker gasped, but Lia twirled on the axis of her body, her blades lashing out with fantastic speed. Two of the Dragon’s talons spun into the air, surgically amputated by the venom of her strike. As the Green reared, bellowing his pain fit to bring down the mountain, a higher, whistling sound registered on the dragonet’s ears. The bravest Humans, cowering at the edge of the tunnel, were treated to the spectacle of Grandion’s stunning strike. The Tourmaline Dragon smashed into the far larger Green at a staggering velocity, his hind paws crushing his opponent’s neck against the tunnel’s edge. Bone cracked sharply.

Of course, Grandion could not resist striking a brawny pose atop the Green Dragon before its dead weight slithered back into the shaft. Flicker sniffed in annoyance, but was rather less annoyed when the Dragon’s paw snapped out to rescue Lia from an incipient attack.

“Over here, Princess of Fra’anior,” he said.

Vile green acid splattered the rock where she had stood.

“Allow me to deal with this ill-mannered lout,” Grandion continued, flicking Lia in one direction while he dodged to his left paw. Another Green smashed into the platforms where the Tourmaline Dragon had stood but a heartbeat before, roaring in fury and pain as he missed his strike. Grandion was in no mood to return the favour. Lightning flared. His fangs closed on the Green’s wing and with a ferocious bite, Grandion ground his fangs against the bone near the second wing joint.

The huge Green Dragon lunged, his jaw gaping so wide that he engulfed his opponent’s entire left shoulder in his mouth. Flicker shuddered at the power of that mauling. But Hualiama’s hands blurred into motion. She bent the Haozi bow so hard it creaked audibly, and suddenly an arrow leaped out to bury itself up to the fletching in the Green Dragon’s eye. The creature convulsed. It smashed Grandion against the tunnel wall before shuddering as it broke away, thrashing the cages like clanging cymbals and tumbling into the shaft.

The Tourmaline Dragon shook himself with the air of a wet hound. He rumbled, “Perfect shot, Hualiama. Thanks. Now, your Dragonship awaits. There is but one, a cargo vessel.”

“It will be enough,” she replied, smiling at the Dragon.

“One more matter,” said Grandion, thumping forward with all the arrogance of a victorious Dragon. Lia skipped out of his way. “These stairs must be cleansed of vermin.”

A Dragon’s fire roared up the stairwell.

H
ualiama HUNCHED over
the Dragonship’s controls, gazing out into the Island-World night. Grandion shadowed them upon the starboard beam, his scales lustrous in the moonlight, wings outstretched to glide at the slow speed of a Dragonship with a minimal expenditure of energy. Four more days to Fra’anior if the following wind kept steady, she thought, raising their overall speed to six or seven leagues per hour. King Chalcion had just finished shouting at her for her ‘familiarity’ with the Dragon and stormed off to his cabin. If he only knew … she gritted her teeth. She had enjoyed no word of appreciation from the King bar a grudging acknowledgement of their rescue effort. And a lecture.

Talking to her father was like trying to squeeze prekki juice out of a stone.

Flicker flew with Grandion, leaving Lia alone with her thoughts in the navigation cabin. She glared at the crysglass windows as though they supported Ra’aba’s regime. To her, the transparent panels symbolised the barrier between her and her draconic friends. Not very visible, but undeniably present. What Lia would not have given to be out there, with the scents blowing in her nostrils and the warm winds ruffling her hair …

Hearing the tread of someone stealing up behind her, Hualiama sighed. “I know it’s you, Mom.”

Queen Shyana said, “My Hualiama departed a girl, and returned a woman. What has wrought this change, daughter? Is it love, or loss? What has turned you into such a warrior?”

That girl might as well have been lost in the Cloudlands, for what had transpired after, must change a person’s very soul. But Lia rued the new distance between her and her mother.

“Mom, am I so difficult to love?”

“Oh, petal. It’s your father, isn’t it?” Her mother’s sigh contained depthless wells of grief. Tall and graceful in that most Fra’aniorian way, Shyana was a beauty like her daughter Fyria, and a dancer like Hualiama. Her raven hair fell to her waist, unbound for sleep. Her striking mauve eyes softened in sympathy. “He can be so stupid, so unbendingly proud! Chalcion sees being rescued by his daughter as an insult–to his kingship, to his manhood, I don’t know. He mutters about a royal ward issuing orders. That nonsense about the Dragon is just the smoke of those inner fires, petal.”

Nonsense? Lia allowed herself to be drawn into her mother’s embrace. That was exactly the problem. To Chalcion it was not nonsense. It was the tripartite pillars of honour, law and unshakable belief. Prejudices that ran as deep as the roots of Islands.

“Our main concern is who that Dragon is,” Shyana added. “Grandion is Sapphurion’s son, and not a good egg, petal. He’s been a liability to peace and a claw in his parents’ side since he cracked the shell. You just don’t see the evil in people, or in Dragons, for that matter. You’re kind and sweet–”

“Dragons can change,” Lia said.

“Petal … what attachment have you with that Dragon?”

Now she must tiptoe most carefully, because Shyana was so emotionally perceptive, she’d winkle the truth out of Lia before she knew it. She must tell herself that the Queen’s concern was legitimate, that Grandion could indeed be manipulating her as part of some overarching Dragonish scheme against Humanity. He might have lied about being a changed Dragon. Shyana, for her part, must sense something of Lia’s conflicted feelings and fear that their roots might drink from the most forbidden well of all.

Ironic. She had told Ja’al things could not be more or less forbidden, but she had been wrong. Some things were anathema, beyond the pale of reason.

Lia said, “It’s a debt of life, mother. Grandion feels obliged to me because, as I shared with you, I saved his life on Ha’athior.”

“Then he’s treading dangerously close to the Dragon law about interfering in Human affairs.”

“He is–but Ra’aba is allied with Dragons.”

Shyana said, “I hope you’re right. Perhaps Sapphurion will overlook the matter of the Island from which you rescued his son, and not be shouted down in the Council of Dragon Elders. It’s a complex situation which we need to approach wisely. Grandion’s request to offer us aid could easily be cast as Dragons helping Humans against Dragons. And you know how jealously they protect their precious holy Isle.”

Grandion’s exact fears. Queen Shyana evidently concealed a shrewd and calculating political mind behind her ethereal, often mystical exterior.

Lia drew breath. “Mom, there’s something you need to know. Something more.”

“What? Secret warrior training?”

“Uh … that too.” Hualiama chuckled. “I am apprenticed to one of the Dragon Warrior monasteries. Please don’t tell Dad! He’d explode.”

The Queen chose this moment to arch an eyebrow at her. “Were the monks nice to you, daughter? Was there a special one?”

“Mom! Aye … there was.” Lia willed her ears not to start burning. “We kissed. But he decided to take his vows of celibacy and service, and we parted as friends. Mom, it’s worse than that. I know who my real parents are.” Now that she had cracked open this chest of secrets, she had to throw the lid right open in a rush, or her courage would fail her. “My mother was an envoy from the East, a woman called Azziala. I’m not sure she ever came to our court, because she was bound for Gi’ishior. But my father … well, you’ve seen my ears.”

Shyana’s hand flew to her mouth. “It wasn’t … he didn’t have an affair, did he?”

“Not Chalcion, no.” Lia had never considered that possibility. Which was worse? Swallowing painfully hard, she rasped, “Ra’aba.”

“Ra’aba? Truly, petal?” Her mother’s shoulders stiffened until she resembled a petrified tree, but when she spoke, it was to add, “I don’t believe it. Never was a daughter less like the father, were that the truth. Why would he not have told us? Clever, though, to keep you nearby where he might watch over you.”

Mother and daughter shivered as one. Lia said, “He never admitted it, because it was neither a happy nor a willing union.”

Shyana searched Hualiama’s eyes, her expression at once so empathetic and affectionate, it evoked tears effortlessly. “Oh, petal. And you believe you’re fated to oppose him? Your own blood-father? My heart weeps terrace lakes.”

At last, she could grieve with one who understood. Lia wept a Cloudlands storm of her own making, thoroughly wetting her mother’s tattered clothing. Such a burden of loss. The pain of the past, translated into the present. The father she had never known, and wanted so desperately to hate. The King and father she did know, who misunderstood and beat her; ungrateful and immovable as an Island. The love of a mother whose arms embraced her now, who would never have given Hualiama up–that was as certain as the suns rising to warm the Island-World. And a fate which drove her beyond what any soul should have to bear.

This was her life’s song.

Blinking away her tears, Hualiama looked beyond her mother’s shoulder, through the crysglass panels to the Dragons. They watched. They knew. Their awesomely sensitive Dragon hearing would have conveyed her tears to dragonet and Dragon just as surely as they would have heard every word of King Chalcion’s rant.

Grandion dipped his muzzle. His voice carried into her mind,
I abide with thee, Lia.

* * * *

After four days aboard the Dragonship, Hualiama could bear it no longer. Caged! Trapped in the same endless conversations, the same lies and half-truths, and the conscious and unconscious relegation of a daughter to her ‘rightful’ place. King Chalcion wished to lay his own plans for retaking his throne. Lia paced the tiny cabin she shared with Fyria, her royal sister, who had thankfully commandeered the single bathroom on the vessel to primp or clean herself or whatever she did to while away the hours. She felt like a caged rajal. Father had made the navigation cabin his own, denying Lia even the pleasure of flying the vessel without his judgmental gaze burning into her shoulders.

If something did not give, she’d explode.

The night was advanced enough that snores gentle and stertorous filled the Dragonship and its cabins, from the tiny private cabins, barely bigger than a closet, to the main cargo hold, overflowing with the sick from the mine. Fifty-three souls in all.

Lia padded to the navigation cabin where Elki was taking his spell at the controls. “Hey, monkey mischief,” she greeted him.

“Hey, short shrift. Couldn’t sleep?”

“Aye. Elki, if I disappeared for a bit, could you and Mom cover for me? I’ll rejoin you either here or at Sa’athior Island.”

“Disappear?” Elki’s normally roguish grin flattened out into a grim white line when he realised what she implied. “You’re not … you aren’t–sister, please don’t tell me …”

Lia raised a finger to his lips. “Shh. Don’t ask. Then you won’t have to tell a lie.”

“Heavens above and Islands below! There never was a Dragonship you ditched near the mine, was there?” He glared out of the window, clearly fighting for calm. He pleaded, “Tell me you’re planning to walk on the clouds to Fra’anior Cluster.”

“Precisely.” She smiled tremulously at her tall, slender brother. “It’s a kind of magic.”

“Magic it is. Good thing you taught me how to pilot a Dragonship, eh? You scamp. You have them all convinced I’m the naughty one, meantime …” Elki’s breath hissed between his teeth. “You do realise how hard this is for a brother? I’m sort of fond of the living, breathing version of Hualiama.”

“Dear one,” she stood on her tiptoes to kiss his bearded cheek, “If the Dragons find out where I’ve been and what I’ve done, I’m already as good as dead. Choice is immaterial. Ra’aba threw me off close enough to Ha’athior Island that Flicker could pull me into a tree. I set foot upon Ha’athiorian soil. Lived there, Islands’ sakes. How is this any different?”

Somehow, it was. His aghast response conveyed the truth. Even if the penalty was the same, a simple trespass felt less of an abomination than what she had done. Yet, how could she change the past? Oaths bound her soul more surely than chains, and her instincts about the Tourmaline Dragon, a hundred times more forcefully yet.